Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Boston CoSGO

April, I am told, is the month of conspiracies. As proof I am given a list of horrible things that happened in April….Oklahoma City, Waco, and now the Boston Marathon Bombings. I am told that these are false flag operations just like 7/7 and 9/11; whose very names testify to the fact that they did not happen in April.

There is no doubt that the Oklahoma City bombing was the result of a conspiracy. The Boston Marathon Bombings were also probably the work of a conspiracy. The bombs certainly did not assemble themselves and accidentally arrive at the finishing line. I suspect that the Boston bombers were part of some Patriot day/ tax day/ teabagger /psychopath group, but I have no evidence of this, and I’ve been wrong in the past. I should put this post up quickly as there are rumors that an arrest is imminent, and it is better to be wrong before there is enough widely available information to show you are wrong.

There is also the conspiracy-conspiracy associated with the Boston bombings. Pictures have popped up with explanations about what couldn’t have happened a certain way. I’ve seen several different versions of lists with titles like: “how to recognize a false-flag operation”. These items did not assemble themselves either. These conspirators are likely sprinkled around the nation. These conspirators hunch over their laptops in fast-food establishments which offer free Wi-Fi. The flow of their words is lubricated by their own unfocused fear, and a layer of trans-fat-laden grease on their keyboard. WE ALL NEED TO KNOW about what could have happened; even if it takes all their Photoshop skills to convince us to pay attention.

I personally like fantasies, and some of the mine are not entirely…well…not entirely… However, I have a keen sense of reality. I usually wear pants in public; even if they are sometimes spandex bicycle shorts.

I could, for instance, dream about riding unicorns through fields of glowing neon flowers, and then stopping at a mossy stream bank, where we could sit hand-in-hand listening to the sounds of sparkling water, and discus quantum physics and the fate of kings. It would be foolish, however, to insist that the dream was true simply because I could play with horse crap the next day and insist that it was unicorn poop. Nor would it be reasonable to imagine that the conversation would be any less wonderful simply because unicorns do not exist.

My little personal conspiracy sample suggests that belief is a big part of this conspiracy-conspiracy. None of the links down teabagger-paranoia-lane have yet failed to prominently feature references to “God” or “Jesus”. It appears as if these conspirators are motivated in part by their faith. It is tempting to suggest that people whose relationship to reality is already stretched by insisting that there is an invisible friend who always talks to them can easily be stretched to accommodate all sorts of paranoid delusions.

There is a well-worn saying that: “just because you are paranoid does not mean they aren’t out to get you”. I would offer as a corollary: “Just because it is April does not mean there is not a history of false flag operations”. In fact one of the most famous American false flag conspiracies occurred (well was supposed to occur) in April, and it had striking similarities to today’s Boston Marathon Bombing false flag conspiracy.

In 1971 Tower Publications, published a “The Scandal of Scientology”; a book about Scientology written a Harvard-educated author by the name of Paulette Cooper. The Church of Scientology was very unhappy with the book. They quickly set about suing Paulette for libel.

Uncomfortable with the prospect of relying on simple legal action the CoSGO (Church of Scientology Guardian Office) set about trying to discredit Paulette. CoSGO just knew she was a sexual deviant so they set about producing evidence of her deviance. They painted her name and phone number on walls so she would get obscene phone calls. They sent letters to her neighbors claiming that she had venereal diseases.

They knew she had it out for the Scientologists so they broke into her home, stole stationary that had her fingerprints on it, and then typed out bomb threats and sent them to themselves. For the bomb threats they had Paulette arrested, and a grand jury even indicted her. However, the best was yet to come; in April of 1976 the CoSGO began planning “Operation Freakout”.

In Operation Freakout CoSGO planned on making bomb threats to Arab embassies in Paulette’s name, send threatening letters with Paulette’s fingerprints to President Ford and Henry Kissinger, and then have a Paulette impersonator make incriminating statements in public. How believable would this conspiracy be as a plot element in a spy movie?

Unfortunately for CoSGO a couple of their agents got caught breaking into a courthouse to support a different conspiracy (Operation Snow White). This put a damper on CoSGO operations, but Operation Freakout planning documents were still on file when the FBI raided the LA CoSGO offices in July of 1977. Sometime later in 1977, after Operation Freakout came to light (According to an affidavit given by Margery Wakefield which became public in 1990), CoSGO was developing plans to assassinate Paulette. Luckily for Paulette they decided it was better to simply settle with her for an undisclosed amount of money in 1985.

It is natural for religiously-extremist Americans to envision conspiracies as they have played significant parts in them in the past. The same logic that allows the creation of stories of divine intervention in order to dupe converts can be used to create stories of evil intention to dupe other potential followers.

The uniquely perverse element is that the very people manufacturing the false proof that there is an intricate conspiracy may actually believe that there is one.

Followers

About Me

I am an adult onset atheist. I cannot blame parents, society, or an unhappy childhood on my decision to abandon all things theist. I clung for a while to a deist god, but it too was eventually thrown onto the trash-heap. Why insist that I am believing in a “god” when “gravity” or “electromagnetic radiation” are better names? I finally found that I was clinging to the weakest shadow of a deist god because I connected the belief in this imaginary entity with so many good things in the world. One day I realized that those good things would be better without the residue of a belief in god contaminating them.